*** Best AG software ***

Just making the transition from extract to AG brewing. I've done some mini mashes as well but am ready to go to next step after building my mash tun last night.
My question is what is the best software for water to grain caculations, strike & mash temps etc. What else is out there good besides beersmith ? Are there any good free caculators or are most of the good ones paid ? Just looking for something solid to take a lot of the guess work & unknown out of the picture. Thanks.

I have been using brewtarget because it's free and works really well. However I recently installed the trial version of beersmith and I like it much better.

I love Beersmith. Worth the money IMO

Even though I think it could *really* use a complete revamping of the "new, improved" interface, Beersmith 2 is still much better than any free beer software I've seen.

I have my own software I made with excel. If you're good with spreadsheets I recomend making your own. You can design it to suit your own needs and it doesn't cost anything except a litte of your time. Plus working with all the equations and making adjustments while you're dialing it in really helps give you a better understanding of the dynamics involved rather than just letting someone else do it all for you.

Beersmith is great and priced very reasonably for it's quality, just finished the trial and will be purchasing before my next brewday. Once they get an android app out it will be even better.

I like Beer Tools Pro but it's probably better to pick the more popular Beersmith due to how much more community support you'll get.

I use Nelsons beer quick calcultor. It's free, but I'm not sure how it compares to beersmith.

Main software is Brewsmith, but without the true portability been experimenting with iBrewMaster for iPad and iPhone.

Since I travel so much for work, been transitioning to iBrewmaster just for the functionality while on the road/plane. This way I can obsess over the brew schedule with my headphones on ignoring my single serving airplane friends.

Both have pluses and minuses, they both accomplish what we all need. Defined recipes and data logging.

Ramitt said:

Beersmith is great and priced very reasonably for it's quality, just finished the trial and will be purchasing before my next brewday. Once they get an android app out it will be even better.

Click to expand...

Brewzor is a free Android app and is great for it's brew calcs. I use it each brew day. Only issue I have with it is sparge volumes, it seems to undercut the expected grain absorption. I'm reading Designing Great Beers and the absorption rate seems more on point in the books estimate. Not really been a problem as it's not off too much and I usually heat extra water. Other than that my temps are always dead on using brewzors calcs.

Oh, and I use Beersmith on my desktop, totally worth the small price!


Rev.

BBL_Brewer said:

I have my own software I made with excel. If you're good with spreadsheets I recomend making your own. You can design it to suit your own needs and it doesn't cost anything except a litte of your time. Plus working with all the equations and making adjustments while you're dialing it in really helps give you a better understanding of the dynamics involved rather than just letting someone else do it all for you.

Click to expand...

I really like this idea! Never thought of this. I use Beersmith, which is great for doing the calcs. But I ran into a snag trying to input a turbid mash. It just wouldn't give me the numbers, so I had to do it on the fly. Having my own adjustable calculations would be easy and make it easy to understand how some of the more complicated calculations work.

AKnewbrews said:

I really like this idea! Never thought of this. I use Beersmith, which is great for doing the calcs. But I ran into a snag trying to input a turbid mash. It just wouldn't give me the numbers, so I had to do it on the fly. Having my own adjustable calculations would be easy and make it easy to understand how some of the more complicated calculations work.

Click to expand...

Yup. Once you gather up all the equations and data it's just a matter of putting together a formula driven spreadsheet with the format of your liking. Then it just mainly comes down to figuring out how much water you're losing to grain, hops, dead space, boil off and what your heat loss is. And tweaking it is a piece of cake since you can edit every aspect of the software yourself. If you get going on one and run into any snags feel free to pm me. I've been developing mine for going on two years now and have worked through some calc issues given the limitations of excel. I've got it tweaked almost perfect and can toggle between 5, 15 and 30 gallon batch sizes.

P.S. Sorry for the hijack OP.

Beersmith, does well, small cost. always accurate for me

Beer smith 2 didn't have as big a selection of grains as I liked, I used Beer tools pro and its exactly what I want, really it all depends on u, u can download free 30 day trials of each and test them out

Beersmith is fantastic...really easy to work with (could be difficult for true beginners that don't understand tun deadspace, etc) but worth the money

I use iBrewmaster along with some spreadsheets. I'm a math guy though, so I like the math behind efficiency, calcs, etc. It works well though with iBrewmaster because I have it on my iPad and thats easy to have around while brewing.

Beersmith is the only thing I use...just wish they had an ipad client/app.

KuntzBrewing said:

Beer smith 2 didn't have as big a selection of grains as I liked, I used Beer tools pro and its exactly what I want, really it all depends on u, u can download free 30 day trials of each and test them out

Click to expand...

Did you try the add-ons? I thought the same thing about not having enough grains to choose from but if you click on the add-ons button that is under the tabs you can import all of the Breiss, Weyermann and a bunch of other smaller maltsters. Not only can you add grains but you can add some yeasts, fruits and a bunch of other recipes. Quite handy.

I also use beersmith 2.0 and while I'm still getting into the details, I find it's incredibly useful tool. I tried the free ones but I found that Beersmith was well worth the small amount of money paid.

I use beersmith. It's got it's quirks and the new 2 version is not as much of an improvement in the interface department as I would have liked.

It does do a pretty good job of letting me tweak amounts and show the results on the screen compared to a style. Plus factoring temps, volumes, etc.

But there is a bit of a learning curve. And you have to input your equipment and guess your efficiency until you get it dialed in. There is some decent help online.

Promash user here, its so dialed in I wouldn't change it. I do print off a Beersmith brew sheet, its just so dang handy. The long awaited new ver of PM is very close to being released, hopefully by summer.

I love Beer Tools Pro. It's easy, great UI, thorough database, and easy to scale recipes based on batch size and/or efficiency.

The community support issue doesn't even factor in for me. I can enter any recipe I see on the forums here, from Brewing Classic Styles, from BYO etc into BTP. scale them to my batch size and efficiency with 1 or 2 mouse clicks, and they ways come out great. I also like the print out for brew day, which I would assume all the programs offer.

Beer Tools Pro.

Satisfaction said:

Main software is Brewsmith, but without the true portability been experimenting with iBrewMaster for iPad and iPhone.

Since I travel so much for work, been transitioning to iBrewmaster just for the functionality while on the road/plane. This way I can obsess over the brew schedule with my headphones on ignoring my single serving airplane friends.

Both have pluses and minuses, they both accomplish what we all need. Defined recipes and data logging.

Click to expand...

Dude you're not supposed to talk about Fight Club!